What’s the most amount of singles for an album?
Just exactly how many singles are too many for an album?
Well, it depends on what time we’re in. Once the album era was in full swing by the end of the 1960s, it didn’t take long for the major labels to crack the singles formula. Drop a single two odd months ahead of the big release, one more on the eve of the big LP day, then another one or two to maintain the record’s shelf life on the charts.
So, traditionally, two to four singles were fair enough. Then streaming struck. All of a sudden, the decades-long singles strategy didn’t command the kind of attention or even cache among consumers as it once had since the days of the rock and roll 45. Singles hadn’t died; indeed, Lil Nas X and Shaboozey enjoyed record-breaking holds at the Hot 100 top spot in recent years, but a new album can ping out as many singles as it likes without the burden of physical manufacturing and the former distribution, labels eyeing up a “focus track” to appeal to Spotify playlist algorithms over mere radio rotation.
This means as many as five or even six can be pumped out into the online sphere, often ahead of time to build a solid streaming foundation. Nonetheless, there are still a handful of earlier albums from the pre-digital age that counted a whopping number of singles that still seem excessive even today.
All across the 1980s, Def Leppard’s Hysteria, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, and Michael Jackson’s Bad all managed seven staggering singles in the bag, the latter enjoying five number ones. Jump to 1999, and Texan country trio The Dixie Chicks doled out eight whole singles for Fly, matched in 2012 by dance producer Calvin Harris’ 18 Months.
None of these, however, holds a candle to one pop behemoth’s sheer bucketload of singles for their defining album.
So, what’s the most amount of singles for an album?
It’s still in the record books.
Dropped in November 1997, Canadian country star Shania Twain was transformed from a national treasure to a global monster on the back of Come on Over’s pop whirlwind, topping charts all over the world and selling an ungodly 40 million reported copies. To this day, Come on Over stands as history’s seventh-biggest-selling album of all time.
Such a phenomenon was centred on the mammoth ‘You’re Still the One’, ‘That Don’t Impress Me Much’, and ‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman!’ which sold multiple platinum levels alone. But spanning a near three-year run between September 1997 and July 2000, Come on Over unleashed a jaw-dropping 12 singles that all floated around the country and pop charts and carried its album on the Billboard 200 top ten for an incredible 151 weeks.
Curiously enough, for such a megahit, neither Come on Over nor its dozen singles ever topped their respective charts in the US; the album specifically kept from number one by rapper Mase’s Harlem World and Barbara Streisand’s Higher Ground.
